y and from
night to night. I tried to busy self, to keep my mind active, to
throw off the spectre that haunted me, but day and night I was
oppressed with a sense of impending danger. We had no wooden door on
the house; we hadn't money to buy the boards to make one, and all my
protection was a blanket hung in the doorway. I used to watch that
blanket at night; I would light the lantern and sit in the corner and
watch that blanket. My fear gradually pictured to itself an attack
through that doorway--I didn't know by what; by white man, or Indian,
or wild beast, or ghost, or worse, if that is possible; my mind could
not balance things; nothing seemed too unreasonable or terrible to
expect. So I took the gun, and sat in the corner, and waited.

"And then at last it came. I didn't see anything, and I didn't hear
anything, but I knew it was there. I still remember how frightened
and yet how cool I was in that last moment. I held the gun to my
shoulder and waited for _It_ to thrust itself against the blanket. In
another moment I am sure I should have fired. But before that moment
I heard my name called, and I knew my husband's voice, and I came out
of the nightmare."

She brought her eyes slowly from the face of the doctor over the
group of men assembled in the room, and then dropped them to meet
Allan's. He was breathing her name softly. "If it was a wrong thing
for Allan to shoot this man," she said, "don't blame Allan for it.
Let me pay any price that must be paid."

"Most extraordinary," the coroner repeated, after a silence. "It
seems to account for the shooting of Riles, but it leaves us as much
as ever--more than ever, I should say--in the dark concerning the
disappearance of the money, and the part which has implicated the
young man Travers in the affair."

The banker gave his evidence. It was not unusual, he said, for
considerable sums in bank-notes to be handled among speculators and
land buyers, but the amount withdrawn by Harris was so great that it
had left him somewhat ill at ease, and as Sergeant Grey had happened
his way he had mentioned the matter to him.

The policeman shed little new light on the case. He had followed the
party into the hills as best he could, taking the off chance of
something sinister afoot. He had found Harris, with his wounded son,
and a prisoner, and a man dead in the doorway. He had notified the
coroner and taken Travers in charge. Here his eyes met Beulah's. "I
don't think ther